Department of Housing and Urban Development uses the numbers to allot funding for programs

Curlie Williams said he isn't looking for a handout, he's looking for a hand up.

BRAD HORN/Nevada Appeal Phillip walks down Carson Street just after 6 a.m. asking for change. Phillip said that he wasn't homeless but claimed to have slept on a bench the night before.

KINSHASA, Congo - Colonial rule, rapacious dictatorship and civil war have so ravaged Congo's economy and society that the streets of its cities swarm with homeless young people who numb their misery with drugs and alcohol.

Sixteen-year-old Baruti Ilanga ran away from home four years ago and now lives in the rusty brown shell of a Toyota, discarded in a cemetery-turned-garbage dump in Kinshasa. Even though there's too many mosquitoes at night and he often goes hungry, he believes he's better off than most of his countryman.

''Everyone in Kinshasa is poor and hungry. At least we are happy,'' the boy shrugged, a half-empty bottle of pale yellow French Pastis beside him. ''It is good in the street. I am free. I do what I want, when I want.''

No one knows how many children and teenagers call the streets their home in Congo. Aid workers estimate between 25,000 and 40,000 children are homeless in Kinshasa alone, and tens of thousands more are said to live in the vast Central African country's other cities.

Next month, the U.N. Children's Fund is holding the first census of Kinshasa's street children since the end of Congo's 1998-2002 war, which killed nearly 4 million and destroyed the country's infrastructure.

Many Kinshasa households are too poor to feed their children. Aid workers say many times only one child is fed on a given day - a desperate solution to the problem of distributing precious food. Other households chose instead to abandon their children, some under pretexts like witchcraft or sorcery.

''My aunt treated me very badly, she would scold me and not feed me. That's why I came here. I feel safe here, with other children like me,'' said Esther Okudi, 14, an orphan who has lived on the street for seven years. Her current home is a wreck of a car near Baruti's.

As evening falls on the Congolese capital, Ilanga and his friends are busy rolling marijuana between their palms. They take swigs of pastis. A group of young street girls appears.

Boys chase the girls playfully, dashing between upright car frames silhouetted against the twilight sky. But their games are hardly innocent. Aid workers say most of the girls, also abandoned children living on the street, are prostitutes.

''They earn a living through prostitution. Some are only 10 years old,'' said Guy Milongo, who works with a local organization to help street children. ''But these children will tell you they are having a good time. There is no one to control them.''

A new generation of children is being born and abandoned by destitute street parents. Without help, these newborns will ...

BILOXI, Miss. - Hundreds of events are planned to mark next week's one-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, but only one attempts to involve the entire Coast from one end to the other, literally.

South Mississippians are being urged to join Hands Across the Coast at 3 p.m. Sunday to support each other on the first anniversary of the fierce hurricane that left many of us homeless.

Harold Roberts is rector of the Episcopal Church of the Redeemer in Biloxi, and he came up with the idea for this unifying observance, perhaps the only one of its kind to mark the anniversary.

"I was asked where it floated up from - the idea," Roberts said Friday, "and maybe it was Hands Across America."

It's been 20 years since 5 million Americans joined Hands Across America to raise money to fight hunger and homelessness.

Roberts recalled that the Episcopal clergy had been talking about what to do for the anniversary, "And no one had come up with an idea everyone could participate in." He has no clue to how many people the idea has reached.

"We've just printed out the (one-page) brochure or forwarded it to anyone we could think of," asking them to forward it along.

Participation in the observance requires only that residents, visitors, volunteers stop what they're doing and walk or drive to the nearest patch of Gulf Coast beach about 2:30 p.m. on Aug. 27. For two minutes, beginning at 3 p.m., everyone at each location will join hands in single line along the beach, "to mourn, to give thanks, to be there with one another.

"One of the real critical issues (since Katrina) is ...

Frank Gray’s column, “Need help from 211? Better call on a weekday” (Aug. 10, Fort Wayne Journal Gazette), highlighting the struggle of a woman trying to find housing on a Sunday morning, underscores the reality that there are some vital services that simply do not exist in our community.

Moreover, there are other services that do not have the capacity to help all the people in need.

The demand for emergency assistance and shelter services is on the rise as a result of changes in our local economy and the statewide increase in foreclosures. The regional United Way-funded 211 Information and Referral Call Center reported that homeless inquiries increased by 57 percent between the first quarter of 2005 and the first quarter of 2006. Total calls for assistance have increased from 16,000 in 2003 to 25,000 in 2005.

Consistently over the past two years, the top three unmet needs in our community have been transportation, financial assistance for utilities and rent, and emergency shelter.

During the first quarter of 2006, 373 inquires were made to 211 regarding homelessness. A key factor driving shelter to the top three of unmet needs in 2006 is the closing of an emergency shelter that housed women and women with children.

There also is not enough ...